Dr Lucy Hone is a leader in the field of resilience psychology who had to use her research in her own life, when her 12-year-old daughter Abi was killed in a car accident in 2014. Today, Hone is a sought-after speaker, a bestselling author, and an award-winning “pracademic”, whose TED talk, “The three secrets of resilient people”, has been viewed more than nine million times. Hone’s book Resilient Grieving looks to shift the narrative around grief, with a revised edition newly released.
In your TED talk, is that a residual English accent?
I was born and bred in London, then I went to university in Edinburgh where I did an MA in history, specialising in American secret intelligence and Russian literature.
That’s a rather quirky combination. Were you going to be a spy?
I wished, but the shoulder tap never came, and I wanted to be a writer or researcher. My first job after graduating was as editorial assistant with Checkout Magazine, an FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] title. At 23, I wrote my first piece for a non-B2B trade mag. It was for Harpers & Queen, as it was called then, about the perils of helicopter parenting, or mollycoddling your children. I laugh today that I had an opinion about parenting before I’d had children, but I realise now that even then I was fascinated by the ingredients of human potential.
A story in Harpers must have felt like the big time. What happened next?
I kept writing, and in my late 20s, I was approached by a guy called Bryn, who’d met my brother in India. Bryn was looking for an editor for The Good Honeymoon Guide. I ended up writing two editions and went on incredible honeymoon junkets all over the world, to India, Thailand, California, Australia and Aotearoa.
Was that your first time to Aotearoa?
Yes, although my sister already lived here. But the story of us moving here permanently is to do with death. My husband, Trevor, and our older son and I were living in England when my mum died six weeks before our second son was born. Then I got pregnant with Abi, and I didn’t want to bring another baby home with no mum around, so we went to Christchurch to be with my sister. It was meant to be for only six months, but we never went back.
So, a rather whimsical degree, two honeymoon books, emigrating to New Zealand with your husband and three children under four – how did that lead to academia?
Around 2008, our three children were all at school, I was still writing, but I’d become frustrated with the overuse of the word “resilience”. It was during the global financial crisis and you couldn’t read the news without being told the economy, nations, us, we all needed to be more resilient. I kept wondering, did anybody actually know what the word meant? At the same time, a dear friend was struggling with her mental health and I didn’t feel able to support her, which added another layer to my curiosity, to discover what science could tell us about navigating mental distress and adversity, and how I could help.
How did you go about this investigation?
In 2009, I was awarded the Susan Byrne Memorial Award to study applied resilience and wellbeing psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It’s a scholarship for female graduates wanting to change careers in midlife. I later learnt that Susan Byrne’s parents set up the scholarship after she died, which, in retrospect, is ironic and beautiful.
Why Philadelphia?
That’s where [psychologist] Martin Seligman taught. He’s celebrated for his studies into learned optimism, and UPenn was one of only two places in the world where you could study resilience back then. I was drawn by their applied work, translating the findings of academia into real-world practice.
Returning to Christchurch in 2011, when the first earthquakes struck, how did you translate your studies from theoretical to practical?
The earthquakes hit just as I came home, so I put my doctoral research on hold and started working with local organisations, helping people get back on their feet in a post-quake world. I’d never done any public speaking, but I was determined to put my training to use. I thought that was my calling, but in 2014, we had our own personal family tragedy testing my learning in a far more profound way. That’s when I learnt about grief.
Most people imagine losing a child would be the end of their own life. How did you cope?
After Abi died, I was so frustrated with the standard grief advice, particularly the passive tone. I didn’t want to be a victim, I wanted to do everything I could to give us the best chance of surviving her loss; for us to stay afloat as a family, and to keep our marriage together. I’ve been on a mission ever since to change the narrative around how people cope with loss, which is why I wrote Resilient Grieving in 2015, then made this the focus of my TED talk in 2019.
You’re a self-confessed introvert, but the demands on you are enormous, with so many people in need. How do you pull up the drawbridge?
I’m pretty good at putting boundaries around work and carving out time to get away from it. When you work in grief, that’s extra important. While I love helping others, I need to ensure I don’t drown in other people’s grief.
Is there a philosophy or technique for coping that particularly resonates with you?
In contemporary grief science, I particularly love “oscillation theory”, which means going between approaching grief, then withdrawing and recovering. We do a beautiful live online course called “A Better Way to Grieve”, to help people cope with substantial loss. We run it over a weekend and each session is just two hours, where we talk and learn, then everyone has the rest of the day to do something else. To lick their wounds and regroup before diving in again the next day – it’s oscillation theory in practice.
With a career that leans so heavily on personal loss, and diving into other people’s grief, do you ever want to be something else?
No. I’m in the right place because it’s not about the pain, it’s about coping. I am driven to help as many people as possible work out how to steer through challenge, change and loss.
So, what is resilience?
Resilience isn’t about hardening up or bouncing back. Instead, it’s about learning to handle negative emotions and finding ways to steer through whatever is facing you. Resilience requires vulnerability. It’s not pretty, easy or fun. Resilience is our capacity to cope, and live full lives, even when we’re navigating the tough stuff. l
To learn more about the programmes Lucy Hone runs, and the resources available, go to: www.copingwithloss.co
